Sparkhill mum left disabled after taxi [sic] crash
May 12 2011
A mum-of-two almost died and has been left disabled after the private hire car she was in crashed while the driver was travelling too fast and on the phone.
Jane Stables said her will to live helped her pull through after the crash, caused by Shahzad Amar.
Mrs Stables, aged 49, who had been a carer for her 14-year-old autistic son James, spent more than two months in hospital and underwent operations all over her body after fracturing her hips, neck and pelvis and breaking her leg, arm and chestbone.
Amar, 21, of Durham Road, Sparkhill, was jailed for eight months after admitting dangerous driving in the head-on collision with another car in the early hours of May 2 last year.
He was also banned from the roads for three years.
The trauma of the accident saw Mrs Stables come close to dying a second time when she haemorrhaged five litres of blood at Selly Oak Hospital.
The former gym fanatic, whose spinal cord was 1mm from being severed, hopes eventually to be able to walk without crutches and is seeking compensation.
Speaking at her Sheldon home, she described how the last thing she remembered was getting into a taxi after a night out in Solihull with her neighbour, 25-year-old Denise Tookey.
“You just expect you’re going to be home in one piece and be taken home safely – not end up with all the injuries I had,” she said.
“I can’t remember any of it. I don’t know whether my mind shut down but I have flashbacks of me lying there. I don’t know whether my imagination is going wild."
“I’m trying to be strong and cope but every day I wake up and think about it. It has impacted my life in a big way and impacted the lives of my children and husband.
“I nearly died and I could have been paralysed, I was that lucky.” Husband Richard, aged 45, raced to the scene after Denise’s partner told him what had happened.
He said: “It was just a mangled mess and pouring down with rain. I thought she’d gone, I thought she’d joined my mum because she died two months before.”
Mrs Stables said: “What happened to me is a story of hope. I should have died. But the nurses told me because I was so fit I could overcome most operations.
“I just had a will to live, I really did. I love my husband to bits and my son and my daughter. When I was lying down in hospital they were all I thought about.”
Judge Patrick Thomas told Amar “You drove too fast and lost control going round a bend, over corrected, and careered across the road and hit another car head on.”
He said it was an aggravating feature that he had been using his phone and went on: “The consequences of your driving were truly dreadful. One of your passengers was very badly shaken up and the other was grievously and almost fatally injured.”
Amy Jacobs, prosecuting at Birmingham Crown Court, said Amar had picked up the passengers although they had not been booked to travel with him.
She said the road conditions were wet and that another driver saw him pulling away “hard” from traffic lights. As he was going along Church Road towards Sheldon, he went round a sharp bend and veered into the opposite side of the road and hit a car travelling in the opposite direction.
Miss Jacobs said it was later estimated that he was going at 48mph at the time of the collision.
She said that Mrs Stables was unconscious when emergency services arrived at the scene and for some time her injuries were considered life threatening.
Justine Robinson, defending, said it had not been a prolonged piece of bad driving.
Source; http://www.birminghammail.net/news/top- ... -28678016/
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